Re: extracting audio from MOV files

[tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx]

Hi Jerry,

I totally understand what your facing - been there myself and still
have to fight the ignorance of so many who don't understand the need
for accissibility to all re: teaching materials and worse yet the
growing misconception that computers/Internet is just a synonym for
Microsoft. However, I was very lucky in that the Maths and Computing
Science department at my university had one of the best system
administrators I've ever come across. Apart from really knowing his
stuff, he has pretty much converted the whole department into open
source evangelists. 10 years ago the department was a mixture of
microsoft unix machines (Dec alphas etc) running true 64 unix and
ultrix versions of unix. Now, we still have some dec alphas, only a
couple of windows boxes and the rest is all linux (even the dec
alphas). They now even have a barewulf cluster and latex is the
dominate text formatting language - even the admin assistants use it!
I'm now working as an analyst/programmer in the IT department and
slowly trying to convince them to utilize more linux and less windows
because its cheaper, requires less maintenance and is mor stable than
microsoft based solutions, but I have a long way to go to convince
a lot of staff who really lack much diagnostic ability and can only
really deal with a point and click, hit and miss windows environment.

Anyway, back to your problems. Firstly, I would check out the policies
of your university and the relevant government legistlation relating to
accessibility. I would be very surprised if there isn't some
legislation which requires that teaching material is accessible to
all. Furthermore, your university probably has some sort of "duty of
care" policy which requires they make material accessible to students
with disabilities. 

In the meantime, some things which may be worth checking out are the
sox package which can convert many different audio formats into .au
formats which you can play. I would also check out the X windows
packages xanim and xmovie which may be able to handle the
format. However, as roger points out, they should provide the material
in mp3 or some other generic format - its completely unacceptable to
only provide materials in a platform specific format in my
opinion. Not only does it make it harder for students with vision
disabilities, it excludes all students working on any other platform
than a microsoft platform and as far as I'm concerned this is
discriminatory!

Good luck

Tim
-- 
Tim Cross
mailto: tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx
phone: +61 2 6772 5973
mobile: 0412 969193
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